While I develope my own game using Unreal Engine, its impossible to stop thinking about legal problems you could get involved and the feeling of being safe and protected. I wanted to pay the fee to Steamworks so I could keep making tests and so but a question on my head kept disturbing me: “What happens if someone register your game name and force you to change it or forces Steam to kick out from there?”
Do we have more tools apart from the Goverment Registration ones?
Here in Spain we could register a TradeMark for a game which costs 144€. It only gives you cover at national level, just in Spain. You can make it international using the european tool EUIPO (https://euipo.europa.eu). So you should pay a fee of…850€!! Steam and Valve are from EEUU so maybe its logic to think your game should be protected by americans laws about copyright and trademarks. Using https://www.uspto.gov the fees are around 225$. I have used the Search Tool they offer and I could see important games listed but I dont find not AAA games.
Do you think its a MUST to register the game itself or at least the trademark of the gamename?
Its an important amount of money just to protect the name but I have never heard about any case where a company or a person force another one to remove a game or change the name cause of this. Do you think its a real risk or just too paranoid?
All that money could be spent on important things destinated to the game like new assets from the unreal marketplace or animations or whatever.
What do you think and suggest?
Maybe theres another tool around Internet to protect your Creations instead of Trademarks and such amounts of money?
Well if you make a hot game expect problems from at least from the copyright squatters squawking at you that you stole their idea. With luck you will be making so much $$ that you can hire someone to handle the 99 problems for you.
Anyways the best way to protect your works as well as branding is to create a web presences and create some prior art to kind of stake your claims way before the game is released.
There’s no way around it. you cant throw caution to the wind, and you can’t stop legal problems with a magic bullet.
You can be the first. Which is always the best, but never the easiest.
There are numerous flappy birds, and pubg, but there is really the first one, and then all the clones.
I personally have legal insurance. It isnt greatest, but it’s almost a requirement Living in the USA.
I try to devote my time to coming up with original, and fun gameplay. In hopes that I don’t burn my time worrying.
In the great game dev pie graph— worry takes up a percentage of a lot of our time. If that time was used making “Fun, and interesting.”
More awesome would be getting churned out, and a lot less shovelware.
Most of the developers seems to register their games at United States Patent and Trademark Office and not internationally using EUIPO.
As I read, its only for EEUU and It will not give you cover outside this country.
Sounds logic for you to register just in EEUU and not Internationally as Steam/Valve, which will be the primal network platform for the game, is american?
Have asked Steam/Valve just about this specifically and they answered they are not allowed to give any advice about legal problems.
